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A woman said Monday that she engaged in an affair with Herman Cain that began in the 1990s, continued as he flew her from city to city for dates, and ended eight months ago.

In an interview, Ginger White offered details of a thirteen-year relationship with Mr. Cain, sharing phone records that showed calls and text messages from his number.

Mr. Cain denied the accusations, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that they had been friends, but that there had been no sexual contact. He characterized their relationship as “trying to help a friend” because of her “not having a job, et cetera, and this sort of thing.”This month, Cain was accused of sexually harassing several women.

Ms. White said she decided to come forward because she feared the affair would be uncovered to reporters by someone who knew of the relationship.

“I’m not proud. I didn’t want to come out with this. I did not,” said White, who described the relationship with Mr. Cain as taking her away from her “humdrum life.”

“It was pretty simple. It wasn’t complicated. I was aware that he was married. I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship,” she said.

Mr. Cain denied the allegations, although his campaign suffered as he bungled his response. First, Mr. Cain refused to acknowledge that harassment allegations were filed against him. He later “recalled” accusations but said they were all “baseless.”

“I know that the court of public opinion is going to formulate its own opinion,” he told CNN. “I can’t control people who are going to make a decision based upon accusations.”

Ms. White said in the television interview that she met Mr. Cain in the late 1990s at a meeting in Louisville, when he was president of the restaurant association. They had drinks, she said, and he invited her to his hotel room, where he pulled out a calendar and suggested that she meet him in Palm Springs, California.

Sharon Bialek, the woman who accused Herman Cain of sexually inappropriate behavior last week, got support Monday, when her ex-boyfriend backed up her claims.

Victor Zuckerman said that Ms. Bialek told him that Mr. Cain had made sexual advances on her in 1997, just after she says the event occurred.

“I can confirm that when she returned, she was upset. She said that something had happened and that Mr. Cain had touched her in an inappropriate matter. She said she handled it and didn’t want to talk about it any further. I respected her request,” he said.Ms. Bialek, who once worked for the foundation affiliated with the National Restaurant Association, said at her own press conference last week that Mr. Cain tried to instigate a sexual encounter with her in exchange for his help in landing a job fourteen years ago.

Mr. Cain has denied Bialek’s accusations, and says he does not remember her.

Mr. Zuckerman, a pediatrician, said the incident had not come up again until recently, in light of Mr. Cain’s presidential bid and the sexual harassment allegations by two women. Remembering Bialek “had a bad experience with him,” Mr. Zuckerman said he contacted Ms. Bialek to ask her if she was one of the anonymous accusers.

“She said no, but also added that based on her experience such accusations didn’t surprise her. She felt she had to respond to these denials by going public with her experience.”

At the news conference, Zuckerman said that he had once filed for bankruptcy. The Cain campaign has attacked Bialek’s credibility, attacking her personal financial history.

His campaign sent the quip out on Twitter almost immediately, to drive home the point, but the public response was not as the campaign might have expected.

“Ay yi yi,” tweeted Dana Perino, who served as White House press secretary for President George W. Bush. “Former Speaker Pelosi called a princess in the debate? Not fair. We may disagree on policy, but she earned the speaker title.”

Mr. Cain later called the remark “a statement that I probably should not have made.”

After battling accusations that he sexually harassed subordinates while he was chief of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s, Mr. Cain faces a new challenge: calibrating his behavior toward women in an atmosphere colored by the allegations.

This was not the first time Mr. Cain had called Ms. Pelosi a princess. On his radio talk show in Atlanta, he referred to her that way routinely.

At the moment, Mr. Cain does not seem to be making a pitch to the general electorate. He is appealing to his base, the energetic, conservative core of the Republican Party.

Women make up the majority of the electorate and tend to register and vote in greater numbers than men, but the Republican base tends to be disproportionately male.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month found that female Republicans were about equally supportive as men of Mr. Cain, within the poll’s margin of sampling error — 28% of women said they support Mr. Cain compared to 22% of men.

Herman Cain convened a televised news conference Tuesday in which he insisted that he is innocent of all sexual harassment accusations, even as another woman said her that he had approached her inappropriately.

Anticipating calls to end his Presidential run, he said it “ain’t going to happen because I’m doing this for the American people and for the children and the grandchildren. And I will not be deterred by false, anonymous, incorrect accusations.”

When you are being sexually harassed in the workplace, you are extremely vulnerable. You do whatever you can to quickly get yourself into a job someplace safe, and that is what I thought I had achieved when I left.

The scandal engulfed the 2012 Republican Presidential contest for another day, prompting pleas from Mr. Cain’s rivals for him to find a way to move on. Mitt Romney said the accusations are “particularly disturbing” and said, “They’re going to have to be addressed seriously.”

During the appearance before reporters in Scottsdale, a defiant Mr. Cain once again declared that Ms. Kraushaar’s accusations were “baseless” and repeated his claim that his only offense against her was to have made an innocent gesture about her height.

“They simply didn’t happen. They simply did not happen,” Mr. Cain said of the accusations of sexual harassment.

Herman Cain said he would offer a defense against allegations from a woman who said he made an unwanted, rough physical advance on her fourteen years ago.

The woman, Sharon Bialek, said Mr. Cain made the advance after she asked him for employment help in 1997 after being fired from the National Restaurant Association.

“There is not an ounce of truth in all of these accusations,” Mr. Cain said in a jovial interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC, where the host discussed the issue in humorous terms.

Mr. Cain said that after Ms. Bialek’s briefing, his wife said, “The things that woman described — that doesn’t even sound like you and I’ve known you for forty-five years.”

Ms. Bialek reiterated the charges in TV appearances late Monday and early Tuesday, putting a public face and name to accusations against Mr. Cain, a Presidential candidate.

She said he suggested she engage with him sexually in return for his help, seizing her and running his hand up her skirt. “Mr. Cain said, ‘You want a job, right?’ ” she said.

Ms. Bialek said she decided to speak publicly to support the other women who have made accusations against Mr. Cain but who will not reveal their names.

Ms. Bialek was the first accuser to publicly allege physical contact on Mr. Cain’s part.

Her appearance on Monday propelled another accusation of sexual conduct against Mr. Cain to center stage in the Republican Presidential nominating contest.

The latest accusation was met with calls from some conservative leaders for Mr. Cain to explain himself, and with a mix of chagrin and defiance from some of his supporters.

Ms. Bialek, a Republican from Chicago, is the fourth woman to have leveled an accusation of sexual harassment against Mr. Cain.

In announcing the news conference, the Cain campaign released a statement saying the allegations were coming from “a woman with a long history of severe financial difficulties, including personal bankruptcy.”

It was the most forceful response yet by Mr. Cain to his accusers. It followed vows that he would no longer speak about the matter.

Mr. Cain shifted his blame from the news media to the Perry campaign. He accused a top adviser to Mr. Perry of leaking details of one allegation, saying the adviser learned of it while working for Mr. Cain’s failed bid for the Senate in 2004.

A spokesman for Mr. Perry called the suggestion “reckless and false,” and denied that the campaign was the source of the disclosures.

The events left the Republican presidential race mired in claims and counterclaims brought about by the sexual harassment allegations, with Mr. Cain blaming Mr. Perry, whose campaign in turn raised the possibility that Mitt Romney’s campaign could be behind the disclosure of the allegations.

Interviews with a dozen people over the last three days paint a picture of Mr. Cain’s 1996-99 tenure at the National Restaurant Association that is at odds with his insistence that he never harassed anyone. Several people who worked at the association said they knew of episodes that women said had made them uncomfortable dealing with Mr. Cain.

One of the two women whose accusations of sexual harassment led to a paid severance agreement has decided against speaking publicly about her side of the story, her lawyer said. “It’s unpleasant and it’s sensational and she does not want to do that,” he said. “She has a life to live and a career, and she doesn’t want to become another Anita Hill.”

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the third woman considered filing a complaint against Mr. Cain over incidents that included an invitation to his apartment.

The woman was one of two whose accusations of sexual harassment by Mr. Cain led to paid severance agreements during his 1996-99 tenure at the association. Disclosure of the severance challenged his description of the matter as a “witch hunt.”

A lawyer for the second woman called on the restaurant association to release her from a confidentiality agreement signed as part of her settlement. The confidentiality agreement left her unable to respond to Mr. Cain’s denials of inappropriate behavior.

The nature of the encounters between Mr. Cain and the two women remains murky. He said that he joked with one of the women about her height, but he has not addressed what happened with the woman said to have received the $35,000 payment.

Asked Tuesday whether he would ask the association to comply with the request to release the woman from the confidentiality agreement, Mr. Cain said, “I can’t give you a definitive answer on that until we consult with our attorneys.”

A spokeswoman for the restaurant association said that the association has not had contact with the woman’s lawyer. She did not address the details of the $35,000 severance arrangement.

Four people with knowledge of the encounter said it took place in the context of a work outing during which there had been heavy drinking. They spoke on condition of anonymity and declined to give details of the encounter.